The Importance Of A Great Website | Wendy Day

¡Hola! Hi guys, so we all know the importance of having a great website. So how come so many of our websites in rap just suck? Today I'm going to talk about websites. Um, we all know how important they are. We all know the value of them. We all know that we have to have one. On our websites, we want to make sure that we've got sections that house your touring schedule, like your calendar, an area for merchandise if you want to sell t-shirts or hats, a spot for your videos, a spot for your music, a spot for all the press that you're getting, a spot for photos, like photographs of yourself, yourself with your fan base as you're out on the road. You're gonna want a place to put your photos so that your fans can go to your website, find the pictures of you with them, and download them. So you may want to categorize them by date or by city. You want to have your bio on there, and for my artists, we even have hidden pages that we put in there for press. And what I mean by that is, um, we store our press photos, we store any footage that we want press to have access to, um, as well as, um, the bio. And sometimes we'll even have like quotes from different, um, people, whether it's other artists, whether it's industry people, whether it's quotes that we pull out from the press that we've already gotten for our artists, but it's a spot where it's hidden and we direct press there with a link. That way, if I'm out on the road, I don't always have to be digging through my phone or my iPad to find what I want to send out to press when they're writing about one of my artists. Um, but one of the main things that you want to do with your websites, and one of the main things I do with my websites, is I capture email addresses. And when it's one of my artist websites, what I do is, um, sometimes I'll exchange an unreleased song for an email address. I use a company called Leadpages, and Leadpages has these wonderful boxes that pop up that say, you know, here, fill in your name and your email address and, um, we'll send you whatever, you know, whether it's, um, a song, you get to download a free song, you get to see an exclusive video that nobody else has seen yet. Um, we trade things for email addresses and we build the email list because it's wonderful to have social media, but if something happens with your social media, like let's say it all goes down tomorrow, how are you going to reach your fans? My artists all have email lists so that they're still able to reach their fans. Not that, not that, you know, the internet, the social media is going to go down tomorrow, but you want to be able to reach your fans whenever you've got a new message, whether you're dropping an album or whether you're about to go out on tour or whether you've got new t-shirts in your, in your online store. You know, whatever message you want to convey, your really hardcore fans are going to follow you by email and they're going to want to know what you've got going on. So in order to, to set up a website, um, the name needs to be similar to your name. So if you're a rapper and your name is Authentic um, you're going to want to have authentic.com. All of your social media is going to want to be @authentic. Well, I realized that most of the web addresses that you'd want to use are taken, so you're going to have to figure out a name that has authentic in it, like therealauthentic.com or iamauthentic.com or authenticwraps.com. But whatever you choose, you want to also choose a similar name for all of your social media, and that's just to keep your branding consistent. For setting up your websites, um, you can use, uh, the free sites like Wix or Squarespace. Um, there's a site called Weebly that I've heard of. I don't know that it's free though. Um, and I've just recently set up a website, um, for one of my stores through Shopify, and it's like a WordPress layout, so it was real easy to set up. I actually did that one myself. I don't recommend that you set up your own website. I usually pay somebody to do it, um, but I wanted the experience and I wanted to see how difficult it was to set up my own website, um, so I did. Um, it's askwendyday.com. But when you're, um, when you're setting up your websites and, and By a website, I don't mean a site that you've set up through like Bandcamp or ReverbNation. While I have nothing against those sites, I don't use them personally for my clients because I don't think, I don't think they look like a professional artist. I don't think Drake is using ReverbNation or Bandcamp, and I want my artists to not look like amateurs. So I avoid, um, Bandcamp and ReverbNation. I know a lot of you guys use them. I have nothing against them, just for my clients I don't, I don't use them. Um, again, I use LeadPages to capture email addresses. Um, I use MailChimp to send out, um, the, the e-blasts, the newsletters. Um, that doesn't mean that you have to use those companies. I've just become very comfortable with them because that's what I use. There's a lot of email companies out there. There's Mad Mimi, there's Constant Contact. Um, when I first started sending, um, email newsletters, um, many, many years ago, I used Constant Contact because it was the one that used to advertise on the platform that I used for my email, so I saw them all the time. I just found them a little expensive, so I stopped using them. Once my email list grew past 5,000, it got really costly. My list now is probably closer to 10,000. I don't send out newsletters like I should. It's just a time constraint for me, but as an artist, you cannot use that excuse. You've gotta have a monthly newsletter that you're sending out to your fans, whether there's 10 of them 100 of them or 100,000 of them. Um, I took notes here. I'm making sure that I, that I, that I'm mentioning everything that I wanted to. Um, on your website you should also have a blog so that you can let people know what's going on in your life, a little peek behind the scenes if you will. Um, it would be ideal if you could update that weekly or if somebody on your team could update that weekly. And then also on your website, you should stream your social media, your Twitter and your Instagram. Definitely have the links to all of your social media. Definitely have links to everywhere that your music is posted, you know, Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, SoundCloud, AudioMac. Wherever you have your music, it should link back to your website. Your website is sort of like your your portal that's everything you. So any— anything that anybody wants to find out about you, they should be coming back to your website. And we use all of our— you know, the front page on my artists' websites changes frequently, and we use the website to announce whatever is the priority in our camp, and then we drive people to that website, obviously because we want to, to capture their email addresses, but we drive them there so that they can get involved in whatever we have going on. If it's a contest, or if a tour is about to go out, or if we have a new design on a t-shirt, you know, for the merchandise. Um, but all of our Facebook ads, our YouTube ads, our Google ads are driven back to the website because we want to have one place where we sort of bring everybody in, and that's our central starting point. And of course on there you're going to find all of our, um, the music is usually, uh, SoundCloud embeds. Um, the videos are usually YouTube embedded. That way all of the listens and the views are counted and As of right now, YouTube is monetized, SoundCloud isn't, but SoundCloud is getting ready to go to monetization. So at some point that will really matter for us. I couldn't find a great example of a website in rap to send you guys to as an example. Not that there aren't any, it's just that I couldn't really find one that I felt was just really extraordinary. But in the, um, I guess New Age world— I don't even know what genre to, to, to call these guys, um— there's a group called Rodrigo and Gabriela, and their website is rodgab.com. R-O-D-G-A-B.com. Um, I don't love the design of their website, but I like how they, how they have their front page constantly changing. It's different every time I go there, and they have all the necessary categories and pages at the top so that you can click on whatever you need to find very easily. It's a great example of a functional website. Again, I don't love the design of it, but I love how functional it is. So if you get a chance, take a look at rodgabb.com. I've got the link below in case you're having trouble spelling it or understanding what I'm saying. Um, but the importance of a website is to let everyone know what you're working on, what your priority is, drive people there, capture their email addresses, um, and then feed them a newsletter once a month letting them know what you've got going on. Um, and the last thing I'll say about it is, um, I use Leadpages to capture the email addresses. LeadPages also has this thing called LeadDigits where you can get folks to text their email addresses to you. And for example, mine is you text WendyDay, all one word, to 44222. And then once they do that, they get a responder back that says, hey, give me your email address. So I can add you to my newsletter. And people will send their email address back to you, and then it goes right into your whatever email service you use. I, again, I use MailChimp, so it goes right into my MailChimp account. And then I have it set up so that different autoresponders will reach out to them and say, hey, thanks for joining my email list. And then it will add them to whatever current list I'm sending out that month. So it doesn't matter where along the month that they join, they still automatically receive my email, my newsletter, and I don't have to do anything. I don't have to even push a button. It's just all set up to automatically do that. And whether you guys are on stage or whether you're doing an interview, it's very easy to tell people, hey, text Wendy Day to to 44222. Obviously you'd use your own name, but it's very easy to tell people to do that. I even have different words set up for different email lists. For example, I've got rapper— you text rapper to 44222 and it goes to a different email list. That email list is for rap artists. So anybody that's reading my book is going to see to text their name to that— excuse me, their email address. And I'm able to then let those people know what I'm working on in terms of building their career. Like when I started this YouTube channel, it gave me a consumer base to let know that I was doing this, and they were likely to want to tune into something like this because they read my book, right? How to Get a Record Deal. When I drop my next book in the spring, I'm gonna use that list for that as well. And of course they get my monthly newsletter as well, but I'm able to, I'm able to keep my email addresses separate and know which people are on which list and what information they might like from me. So it just, it allows me to be more organized. So guys, having a website is really important. You want one focal point for your career. It's sort of like the the central gathering point for who you are, and you want to capture those email addresses. And again, don't do it if you're not going to send out a newsletter. It's kind of a waste of everybody's time. But definitely you should be sending out a newsletter at least once a month. I know there are some folks out there that do it weekly. Your fans really do want to hear from you. They really do want to know what's new and what you've got going on. And the great thing is, if you've got content that matters to them, they'll even share it with their friends. So thanks for tuning in. We drop these videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11:00 AM, and then I go live on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 Eastern Standard Time, and I answer your questions. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye!